The cost of eliminating fossil fuels: $420 billion
Posted 2 years 4 weeks ago byScientific American offers up a 40-year, $420 billion plan to wean America off of fossil fuels.
The federal government would have to invest more than $400 billion over the next 40 years to complete the 2050 plan. That investment is substantial, but the payoff is greater. Solar plants consume little or no fuel, saving billions of dollars year after year. The infrastructure would displace 300 large coal-fired power plants and 300 more large natural gas plants and all the fuels they consume. The plan would effectively eliminate all imported oil, fundamentally cutting U.S. trade deficits and easing political tension in the Middle East and elsewhere.
Gristmill points out the pricetag is less than a single year of U.S. military funding.
The main problem with this plan is that it take 40 years to implement -- in fact, it could be done more quickly if we're willing to spend more money.
Isn't this idea worth a national discussion?
Thoughts
All of the "green" technology
Submitted on April 7th, 2008 by AnonymousJust how green would this green technology be if implemented even in the next 50 years?
Not very. Biofuels especially are a ridiculous hope at their current day efficiencies. If you look at how productive they are per acre of crop, we would need a land area larger than that of the US merely to get <(1/3) of our oil consumption from our current biofuels. (I would urge anyone and everyone to look further into the subject themselves).
Hydrogen cars are very interesting. The way they are boasted of, it seems almost as though they are perfect. Far from it. With what is known as the water-energy nexus, you have two forces. One is that when you create energy, you use water. Like wise, when you filter/clean/purify/desalinize water, you expend energy. Hydrogen cars would unbalance this already frail system as their production and even use could potentially cause an increase in the need for water. Note 1 billion people in the world already go with very minute amounts of water, another billion have water that is not properly sanitized. (again I urge everyone to look into this in more detail themselves, don't just take my word for it).
Solar energy would be a great alternative, wind energy as well. The only problem is that they are not yet effective enough to become such a huge part of our energy consuming system. I only wish we had researched all of these technologies earlier instead of sitting behind a desk pointing fingers, shouting at the top our lungs about sciences that are still in their infantile stages in terms of how much we actually understand about the extremely complex systems that affect our planet.
Should we clean up our plane? YES! I doubt very seriously that anyone is against that idea, but we HAVE TO go about it in a way where it will be beneficial for everyone, not just people getting rich of scare-mongering.
Al Gore, get off your high chair, drop your sippy-cup for 5 minutes, say you were wrong and just let it go.
A changing climate is supposed to occur during inter-glacial periods, for that matter glacial periods as well, there is nothing to say that it shouldn't. The only way we will affectively be able to get through all these changes, as unscathed as possible, is to step back, admit that we don't know everything, and work with one another for the betterment of man-kind.
Spreading fear does nothing and is no substitute for having a lack of scientific support.
I urge everyone and everyone to look into all of this yourselves, look purely at the data and facts and understand that there are and I repeat Are, thousands of different manipulators of global climate some of which we are just now beginning to research.
Re: Oil weaning
Submitted on February 20th, 2008 by JoelIf the oil companies think of themselves more broadly as energy companies -- and they seem to be doing that, PR-wise, of late -- then they'll hop on the bandwagon. Given that it will probably be a necessity sooner or later, anyway, it would certainly be in their interests to do so.
Oil weaning and such...
Submitted on February 20th, 2008 by OtherJoelI concur, good sir. But how much revenue will the oil companies lose? Eventually, they'll be on board out of necessity and it will probably be profitable again at a certain point, but they will definitely have to take a hit initially for any meaningful transition to take place. Something tells me they will try to make that happen later, not sooner.